chemistry

Richard Hoogenboom

Richard Hoogenboom is a chemistry topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Richard Hoogenboom rather than just read about it. In short: Richard Hoogenboom (born 3 March 1978) is a Dutch polymer chemist. He is a senior full professor at Ghent University, where he heads the Supramolecular Chemistry group in the Department of Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry.

Key takeaways

Richard Hoogenboom belongs to chemistry; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Richard Hoogenboom to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Richard Hoogenboom from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Richard Hoogenboom (born 3 March 1978) is a Dutch polymer chemist. He is a senior full professor at Ghent University, where he heads the Supramolecular Chemistry group in the Department of Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry. His work focuses on poly(2-oxazoline)s, responsive polymers and supramolecular materials. Hoogenboom completed his PhD at Eindhoven University of Technology in 2005 and moved to Ghent University in 2010. He has been editor-in-chief of European Polymer Journal since 2019, and in 2018 he founded Avroxa, a Ghent University spin-off that sells poly(2-oxazoline)s under the name Ultroxa. He received the American Chemical Society Carl S. Marvel Award for Creative Polymer Chemistry in 2021 and was elected a member of the Academia Europaea in 2025.

Early life and education Hoogenboom was born on 3 March 1978 in Rotterdam. He completed an MSc in chemistry and chemical engineering at Eindhoven University of Technology in 2001. He obtained a PhD in organic and polymer chemistry at the same institution on 14 November 2005, under Ulrich S. Schubert. His doctoral research applied two techniques from other branches of chemistry to polymer synthesis: high-throughput experimentation, in which a robot runs many reactions in parallel, and microwave irradiation as a heating method. Combining the two reduced the synthesis time for poly(2-oxazoline)s from around twenty hours to two minutes.

Career From 2005 to 2008 Hoogenboom was a project leader for the Dutch Polymer Institute in Eindhoven. From 2007 he combined this with part-time work as a senior product developer at the medical device company Dolphys Medical. He then moved to RWTH Aachen University as an Alexander von Humboldt fellow with Martin Möller. A Veni grant took him to Roeland Nolte's group at Radboud University Nijmegen the following year. Ghent University appointed him associate professor in 2010 on a research professorship. He was promoted to full professor in October 2014 and to senior full professor in 2022. In 2018 he founded Avroxa, a Ghent University spin-off where he is scientific advisor.

Research Hoogenboom works on poly(2-oxazoline)s, polymers made by cationic ring-opening polymerization of 2-oxazoline monomers. A 2009 review he wrote in Angewandte Chemie surveyed the synthesis and applications of the class. Poly(2-oxazoline)s have been studied as a substitute for polyethylene glycol in drug delivery, which he and co-authors reviewed in 2010. His group reported a route to poly(2-oxazoline)s of defined high molar mass in 2018. Working with the Ghent organic chemist Johan Winne, Hoogenboom's group reported the first synthesis and characterization of tetrahydrooxazepine in 2018, a seven-membered cyclic imino ether. A second line of work concerns thermoresponsive polymers, whose solubility in water changes with temperature. He has published on polymers with an upper critical solution temperature in mixtures of alcohol and water and, with Schubert and others, on how the lower critical solution temperature should be measured and reported. In 2013 he was a co-author of a paper in Nature on thermoresponsive hydrogels formed from polyisocyanopeptides. The group also works on hydrogels and functional coatings. With colleagues at Radboud University Medical Center and the company GATT Technologies, Hoogenboom described hemostatic patches based on N-hydroxysuccinimide-ester functionalized poly(2-oxazoline)s in 2017. In 2014 the group used a laboratory robot capable of running sixteen parallel reactions to optimise a copper-mediated radical polymerisation of hydrophobic acrylates, work that C2W covered at the time. Fluorinated poly(2-oxazoline)s from the group have been applied as fluorine-19 magnetic resonance imaging contrast agents. The group has also made halochromic materials for pH sensing and X-ray scintillating composites. With groups at KU Leuven and Lancaster University he contributed to a single-molecule-thick cyclodextrin coating for electrochemical sensors, reported in 2019.

Editorial and advisory work Hoogenboom was an associate editor of European Polymer Journal and became its editor-in-chief in 2019. He was an associate editor of Australian Journal of Chemistry until 2025. He sits on the advisory boards of Chem and Macromolecular Rapid Communications.

Awards and honours Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (2012) Polymer Chemistry Lectureship, Royal Society of Chemistry (2015) Polymer International–IUPAC Award for Creativity in Applied Polymer Science (2016) Carl S. Marvel Award for Creative Polymer Chemistry, ACS (2021) Fellow of the ACS Division of Polymer Chemistry (2022) Fellow of the ACS Division of Polymeric Materials: Science and Engineering (2025) Member of the Academia Europaea (2025)

Selected publications

Books Hoogenboom, Richard; Schubert, Ulrich S.; Wiesbrock, Frank, eds. (2016). Microwave-assisted Polymer Synthesis. Advances in Polymer Science. Vol. 274. Springer. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-42241-1. ISBN 978-3-319-42239-8. Singha, Nikhil K.; Mondal, Prantik; Hoogenboom, Richard, eds. (2024). Click Chemistry in Polymer Science: Designs to Applications. Polymer Chemistry Series. Vol. 39. Royal Society of Chemistry. ISBN 978-1-83916-707-2. Section editor (volume 1, with Nikhil K. Singha), Comprehensive Polymer Science, 3rd edition, Elsevier, 2024.

… excerpt ends here. Continue reading the full article.

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Richard Hoogenboom

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Richard Hoogenboom claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In chemistry, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Richard Hoogenboom before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Richard Hoogenboom ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Richard Hoogenboom

In research: Richard Hoogenboom appears in chemistry research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Richard Hoogenboom in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Richard Hoogenboom is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics 1978 births, Academic journal editors, Academic staff of Ghent University, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Richard Hoogenboom outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Richard Hoogenboom in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Richard Hoogenboom means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Richard Hoogenboom out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Richard Hoogenboom in simple terms?

Why does Richard Hoogenboom matter?

Because it connects several chemistry ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Richard Hoogenboom?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Richard Hoogenboom.